Today's universities, wherever they are, and there are about 24,000 of them, have been heavily influenced in notions of scholarship and research, in what they teach and how they teach it, by Western examples.

I guess we are supposed to look back lovingly at all those civilisations that crumbled in the face of the western onslaught, for example, Czarist Russia, Qing China, Mughal India, Ottoman MENA and Aztec Mesoamerica.

As it is taught today, history is a chronicle of power struggles and war, told from a biased national standpoint. But the true history of humanity is a history of ideas, inventions, progress, shared knowledge, shared culture and cooperation.